Category Archives: New Utopia

Riverdale Season 6 is far from over. In November, the CWs Archie Comics adaptation kicked off its five-episode Rivervale event set in an alternate universe. After five weeks of shocking deaths, confusing twists, and even a cameo from Sabrina Spellman, the event concluded with Riverdales 100th episode on Dec. 14. Riverdale Season 6 is now on its winter hiatus, but the teen drama will return in spring 2022. Heres everything to know about the mid-season return.

The Rivervale event aired on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET. However, fans shouldnt get too attached to that time slot. According to the CWs mid-season schedule, Riverdale Season 6 will pick up on March 6 at 8 p.m. Instead of Tuesday nights, the show will air weekly on Sunday nights at its new time.

And as for how many more episodes fans can expect from the season, the answer isnt quite clear yet. A report from Decider in December seemed to indicate the cast is still filming season 6. If thats the case, the season might finish airing sometime in the summer. For reference, previous Riverdale seasons have included anywhere from 13 to 22 episodes.

It looks like most of the cast will remain the same heading into the second half of season 6. That includes KJ Apa, Lili Reinhart, Camila Mendes, Cole Sprouse, Madelaine Petsch, Vanessa Morgan, Casey Cott, Mdchen Amick, Charles Melton, Drew Ray Tanner, and Erinn Westbrook. However, the CW did bring on one new face.

As Deadline reported, Yous Chris OShea has joined the Riverdale cast in a recurring role for the rest of the season. Hell play Percival Pickens, the towns newest baddie. Percival is described as charming but manipulative, powerful, and increasingly dangerous. Hell clash with Riverdales residents, especially Archie.

A descendent of one of Riverdales founding fathers, General Pickens, Percival wants to turn Riverdale into a utopia, a dark agenda he pursues quietly but ruthlessly, the character description reads.

The first half of Riverdale Season 6 brings its characters to a much darker and more dangerous version of Riverdale called Rivervale. No one is safe in this alternate reality, and supernatural occurrences are common.

When Riverdale returns with season 6 episode 6, the story picks up where season 5 left off. The disgraced and exiled Hiram Lodge (Mark Conseulos) plants a bomb in Archies (Apa) room, where he and Betty (Reinhart) are hooking up. Although they survive the blast, the incident will have lasting effects.

Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa hasnt shared too much about what to expect from the rest of the season. However, he did have an ominous message for fans via Variety:

Death is definitely coming to Riverdale, and it is definitely permanent.

Riverdale Seasons 1 through 5 are now streaming on Netflix. Meanwhile, fans can catch up on the Rivervale event via The CWs website and app.

RELATED: Riverdale Cast Teases 100th Episode: Nothings Off the Table, Everyones a Savage

Read more from the original source:

Riverdale' Season 6 Mid-Season Return: Release Date, New Cast, and What to Expect - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

The ball ambled into the far corner of the net and Marcelo Bielsa fell instantly into the arms of his assistant, Pablo Quiroga. Seconds remained but the game was done and the pair of them stood there, embracing tightly for what felt like an eternity. Amid the pandemonium they were lost in time and in each others orbit.

Bielsa does not go in for unsolicited celebrations and even at Swansea City, on the day when the Championship gave up on holding Leeds United against their will, he limited himself to a clench of his fists and a wipe of his nose as Pablo Hernandez cleared the way to utopia.

His staff have learned to keep their distance when goals fly in. But gentle emotion like Elland Road saw yesterday is what drips from Bielsa when the dogs are on him, when the strain builds and self-doubt develops. No length of service in football makes a coach impervious to a league table as the Premier League looked to Bielsa on New Years Day.

His hug with Quiroga was like their hug away to Rotherham United in 2019, at the end of a victory that brought welcome relief in the wake of Spygate. Bielsa had spent the fortnight before that win fighting fires with his integrity under attack and Quirogas beeline to him at full-time was a symbolic line in the sand.

Bielsa had form on his side back then, though, and the unerring confidence of everyone in Leeds. That he and Quiroga were embracing before full-time against

See the rest here:

Marcelo Bielsa and a hug that says it all - The Athletic

In an era when social media has made everyone with an annual pass a theme park influencer, it seems like weve got rankings of every Disneyland ride, wait time, snack, souvenir and entertainment offering. But no one is talking about one of the most crucial elements to the park experience: the smell. Walt Disney himself knew that scents were important to forming positive memories. Just think about the irresistible aroma of baked goods on Main Street, or the popcorn carts in the hub, and how integral they are to the park experience. That philosophy has carried itself through Disneyland ride design for the past six-plus decades.

Well, for the most part. Some rides need a serious scent makeover. Here are the highs and lows of the ride scents at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure, in a totally subjective ranking from best to worst, based solely on opinions Ive formed on my many trips around the track.

Soarin' Around the World

1. Soarin Around the WorldThere can hardly be an argument about the fact that Soarin Around the World, the attraction that most prominently features scents, is the best smelling in Disneyland. Im sure there are plenty of you who are totally incensed (see what I did there?) that Pirates isnt No. 1. Dont worry, well get there, but for now, just take a moment to remember the pure bliss of being suspended in the air, surrounded by an 80-foot, 180-degree screen, as you breathe in the grassy savannah of Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzania, the cool ocean breezes of the Lau Islands in Fiji, and the jasmine surrounding the Taj Mahal in India. Or, at least, Disneys interpretation of what those places smell like.

2. Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!Heres the sleeper hit of this list. The Monsters, Inc. ride in Hollywoodland in Disney California Adventure has subtle scents, but it smells delicious. Next time youre cruising through Monstropolis, take an extra-deep breath in the Harryhausens scene, when a sharp, pleasant scent of ginger pervades the air. In the ride finale Scare Floor, at the part where a door randomly opens to reveal a different scene each time, youll get a blast of sweet lemon if you happen to get the Adorable Snowman door. It smells so good that it sends me beelining to Adorable Snowman Frosted Treats for a Pixar Pier Frosty Parfait every. Single. Time.

Pirates of the Caribbean

3. Pirates of the CaribbeanOK, its the moment youve been waiting for. The scent of this iconic 1967 ride is, for many people, the defining scent of Disneyland. But what does it smell like? I can never quite put my finger on it, other than that its one part chemical (the bromine the park uses to clean the water), one part smoke and fog from the special effects, one part kitchen aromas from Blue Bayou, one part mustiness from the attractions 54 years of history and one part nostalgia. The scent is so deeply beloved that it has inspired candles, room sprays, even perfumes.

The gingerbread house from the 2018 Haunted Mansion Holiday

4. Haunted Mansion HolidayIm a Haunted Mansion purist. Its not that I dont love the seasonal overlay of Haunted Mansion Holiday, its just that I love the original spooky dark ride more. But when my Doom Buggy rolls into the Halloweentown-inspired ballroom scene and I get a whiff of the spicy-sweet air coming off that killer gingerbread house, I cant help but feel excited. Does it feel too Christmasy at Halloween and too Halloweeny at Christmas? Of course, but thats all part of the delightful conundrum that is The Nightmare Before Christmas.

"It's a Small World" Holiday

5. Its a Small World HolidayIn a total reversal from my stance on Disneylands other holiday overlay, the festive version of Its a Small World is my absolute favorite iteration of that ride. The coconut smell in the Hawaii scene, the jasmine in the India scene and the unmistakably Disney-at-Christmas gingerbread scent are all welcome additions for me.

6. The Many Adventures of Winnie the PoohHeffalumps and Woozles dont have a smell, but the honey pots in this ride definitely do. The sugary scent of Poohs favorite food is subtle on this ride, but it adds to the atmosphere in just the right way. It also gets your taste buds ready for a sweet treat from Pooh Corner, if youre like me.

The Disneyland Railroad in New Orleans Station

7. Disneyland RailroadMaybe the Disneyland Railroad doesnt have an aroma you can really pinpoint, but its second only to Pirates in what you might describe as the Disneyland scent you find on older attractions. Next time youre chugging through the Primeval World section of the track, with the dinosaurs, take a deep breath. Its part pleasantly musty, part like old plastic plants. To me, it smells like the field trips I used to take to museums when I was a kid, and I get a delightful sense of nostalgia every time I ride.

Jungle Cruise

8. Jungle CruiseIf the backside of water had a smell, it would be this combination of foliage, flowers, animatronic animals and unapologetic puns. Jungle Cruise has less of a scent and more of a refreshing atmosphere. Its not just a nice break from walking and from thrill rides with the water and the shade, this boat ride is also a nice break from the dry California heat.

9. Big Thunder Mountain RailroadMost of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad doesnt have a particular smell, which, given that its based on the Wild West, a time not particularly remembered for its hygiene, is probably a good thing. Theres one part that does have an olfactory component to it, though: In the scene where the mine is about to explode, theres a burning scent. The first time I smelled it after the ride was plussed to include the smoke smell, I thought maybe it was the machinery of the train itself. Now I know its just a haunted mine about to detonate with me inside. Much better.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

10. Mr. Toads Wild RideJust like on Big Thunder Mountain, the only part of Mr. Toad that has a smell is the most intense part only instead of barely escaping an incendiary mine, you descend into literal hell. The blast of heat that comes with the appearance of the devils has a hot, dry scent that isnt exactly pleasant but perfectly fits the netherworld scene.

11. Casey Jr. Circus TrainThis little kid ride in Fantasyland isnt the worst smelling ride in the park, but its close. The smell of the engine of this narrow gauge train, which opened as an original attraction in 1955, is a little too strong for my preference. Maybe Im just averse to squeezing myself into a kid-sized monkey cage, though. Its a real toss up.

Autopia in 1957

12. AutopiaYou had to know this was coming, right? Jack Plotnick, who makes modern updates to classic Wonderful World of Color videos, described Autopia as a ride for people who, I guess, like sitting in traffic. The only difference is the exhaust on the kid-sized cars on this Tomorrowland ride actually smells worse than a freeway full of rush hour-trapped cars in the middle of a heat wave. Every time I get a whiff of this odiferous attraction I wonder why, when there are so many fumes coming off the cars, Disneyland still has it operating in fundamentally the same way it was when the park opened in 1955 (though the most recent versions of the cars to be implemented went in in 2000). The kicker? Autopias name is a portmanteau of automobile utopia. Oh, the irony.

Continued here:

Does it pass the smell test? Disneyland rides ranked by their scents. - SF Gate

David Byrne will present a revised version of his American Utopia Broadway show beginning Tuesday, due to several breakthrough Covid cases among his onstage band.

In an Instagram video today (watch it below), Byrne explained that with several band and crew members out, he and the remaining Utopia band will temporarily perform a new show at the St. James Theatre. The new show will include songs from his Talking Heads era, his solo albums as well as some of the American Utopia numbers.

In the video, Byrne says that rather than canceling our shows, he will honor our commitment to ticket-holders. Were going to do a show that, well, were just going to come up with the show! Hey, lets make a show! He described the revised show as unlike anything weve done before.

In a second Instagram video, Byrne offers a sneak peek of at least one song on the new set list: A rehearsal of the song And She Was can be heard as the camera focuses on a masked band member.

The new show Byrne calls is Unplugged, or maybe Unchained will begin with the Tuesday, Dec. 28, 8 p.m. performance. The unplugged Utopia will then play the following dates:

Byrne says in the video that hes only going to do it for a few weeks and then we hope well all be back with the regular American Utopia show.

Watch both Instagram videos below.

Go here to see the original:

David Byrne Revises American Utopia On Broadway Due To Band Member Covid: Teases Unplugged & Unchained Version With Sneak Peek Video - Deadline

This is an extract from Enzo Traversos new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations official communism and Cold War anti-communism also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive lans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other isms of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately ambiguous word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its anatomy, one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the long nineteenth century, and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenins The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotskys Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenins State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marxs ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the laws of history. The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue dure of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the laws of history. But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of historical laws, the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 179394.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik coup. Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a conspiracy. In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an overthrowing or an uprising (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik coup is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different not to say antipodal but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes as in Kronstadt against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 191819, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism either social democratic or anarchist of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (191821), the collectivization of agriculture (193033), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (193638).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a betrayed revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies notably the peasantry and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices pogroms and massacres pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s collectivization and the purges in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalins violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

Stalinism was a revolution from above, a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a feudal exploitation of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes. Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serges assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalins USSR had become in his words an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count. But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of primitive capital accumulation.

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the midwife of history and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the wheel of history rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry inherited from Marxs writings on French Bonapartism as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian backwardness.

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry instead of the urban proletariat as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself.

The proclamation of the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marxs death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the civilizing mission of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties particularly those located in the biggest empires postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which civilized Europe could and must act as tutor to barbarous Asia. Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of white European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSRs foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empires involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a human face.

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSRs foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under Franois Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavias social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was municipal socialism in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian red belt. In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of local, postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious and largely achieved goal of defending the principle of the free market against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a plan that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentiers role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its savage face, rediscovered the lan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a natural form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the alter-globalization movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm piling wreckage upon wreckage, in Walter Benjamins image, and which millions of people mistakenly called Progress? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a cold utopia.

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and memory flash up. Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

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We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History - Jacobin magazine

Dior has announced its decision to postpone indefinitely the launch of a new collaboration with Travis Scotts Cactus Jack.

In a statement shared with Womens Wear Daily on Tuesday, a rep for the French luxury housesaid the indefinite postponement was spurred by last months fatal Astroworld Festival in Scotts hometown of Houston. While fans have already been given a look at the collaborative pieces, the items werent expected to begin rolling out until next year.

Out of respect for everyone affected by the tragic events at Astroworld,Diorhas decided to postpone indefinitely the launch of products from the Cactus Jack collaboration originally intended to be included in its summer 2022 collection, a companyrep said.

Complex has reached out to a rep for Dior for additional comment and will update this post accordingly. The announcement of the indefinite postponement comesweeks after Anheuser-Busch said that its Cacti seltzer line with the Utopia artist was being discontinued.

Meanwhile, a source familiar with the Dior situation told Complex that the latest move marked a mutual decision made by both Dior and Travis Scott to postpone the upcoming collection due in Jan 22 with both parties working to reschedule the launch at a later date.

As reported earlier this month, 10 Astroworld Festival attendees (including eight on the evening of Nov. 5 and two more in subsequent days) have been determined by medical officials to have died from compression asphyxia.Also this month, a congressional committee started an investigation focused on Live Nations alleged role in the tragedy.

In his first interview since the Astroworld tragedy, Scott told Charlamagne Tha God that hes aiming tobecome a voice for the larger issue of concert safety moving forward.

I gotta step up and be a voice to just figure out [how] this doesnt happen in the future at shows, period, or figure out the bottom solution of whats going on and ensure peoples safety, he said in the interview, which debuted earlier this month.

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Dior Has Decided to Postpone Indefinitely the Launch of Collaboration With Travis Scott's Cactus Jack - Complex

In 1642, Abel Tasman, an experienced Dutch sailor and penchant for rough justice, was confident that in the southern hemisphere exists a vast continent and was determined to find it.

He believed that he had discovered the great southern continent, evidently, it was hardly the commercial utopia he had envisaged and then he did not return.

BBC reported that Tasman was right after all there was indeed an undiscovered continent.

A group of geologists had made headlines in 2017 for their announcement of discovering Zealandia Te Riu-a-Mui in the Mori language. It is a vast continent of 1.89 million sq miles (4.9 million sq km) it is around six times the size of Madagascar, the broadcaster reported.

According to theBBC report, the world's encyclopedias, maps, and search engines for some time were determined over the fact that there are only seven continents, butthe team confidently informed the world that this was wrong.

"There are eight after all and the latest addition breaks all the records, as the smallest, thinnest, and youngest in the world. The catch is that 94% of it is underwater, with just a handful of islands, such as New Zealand, thrusting out from its oceanic depths. It had been hiding in plain sight all along," BBC reported.

Andy Tulloch, a geologist at the New Zealand Crown Research Institute GNS Science, who was part of the team that discovered Zealandia, said: "This is an example of how something very obvious can take a while to uncover."

This all is just the begging as four years on, and the continent is as enigmatic as ever, it is guarded beneath6,560 ft (2km) of water, BBCreported.

According to geologists, Zealandia is a continent because of the kinds of rocks found there, despite that it is thin and is submerged. The ocean floor is more just made up ofigneous ones such as basalt. While the continental crust tends to be made up of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks like granite, schist and limestone.

According to the report, geologists find the eighth continent still very intriguing it's still not clear how Zealandia managed to stay together when it's so thin and not disintegrate into tiny micro-continents.

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After 375 years, scientists discover eighth continent - Geo News

New Year's resolutions are often dismissed as being vague, overly-ambitious delusions that are ultimately doomed to failure. But resolutions that involve tech? Well, they're a different story.

Whether you're planning to peel yourself off the sofa towards a new fitness goal, or build the ultimate hi-fi setup, our new series (running from Sunday December 26th to Sunday January 2nd) will show you how to fly through the January wastelands using your tech-based hoverboard.

Why tie your resolutions to tech? There are a couple of good reasons. Firstly, a popular strategy for building new habits is called 'temptation bundling'. In short, linking something you like (gadgets) to something you're less keen on (your resolution) is generally more sustainable in the long-run. Also, we're big fans of blaming our failures and shortcomings on inanimate objects.

But while Apple Watches, Chromebooks and air fryers can all be springboards to better habits (as we'll reveal in this series), new year's resolutions don't have to be about self-improvement. As our Senior Computing editor Matt Hanson convincingly argues in his commitment to doing more PC gaming in 2022, it's also a good time for tech-based self-care particularly after the year most of us have had.

So while our guides cover how to reach classic goals using tech like Nintendo's Ring Fit, ergonomic keyboards and Pikmin Bloom, we'll also explore the more self-indulgent resolutions our team is aiming for in 2022 like why it's finally a good time to invest in an LG OLED TV or lose yourself in VR.

Whether you're a fan of new year's resolutions or not, make sure to bookmark this page to discover how we're planning to use tech for the better in 2022 it might just spark some ideas on how to use your new Christmas presents.

Whether you've just unwrapped a new Chromebook over Christmas, or been wondering how to master your existing Chrome OS laptop, our guide will show you how to harness its talents and achieve 'poweruser' status.

In the computing equivalent of a couch-to-5K, we cover how to embrace the Chrome OS launcher, get the most out of tablet mode, and much more. You'll be setting productivity PBs in no time.

Forget health kicks it's your home music setup that needs to hit the gym in 2022. Not sure where to start? Our in-depth guide is here to help you plan your hi-fi system, from the choosing your source through to amplification and speakers.

This new year project doesn't have to cost thousands either we cover how to fold your existing kit into a delicious audio sponge cake, and top it off with the best cables, stands and wireless accessories.

We're rapidly moving towards that time of year when ordering takeaways becomes nigh-on impossible to resist but our Smart Home & Appliances Editor, Carrie-Ann Skinner, has pledged to beat the habit this year with a seemingly unlikely accessory.

Air fryers might not sound significantly healthier than your favorite local fried chicken wing haunt. But as you'll discover in this insightful ode to the increasingly popular kitchen staple, they are far healthier than deep frying, while also offering the speed needed to beat your takeaway habit.

Boosting your fitness is a new year's resolution staple, but some of the classic methods like gyms aren't available to everyone particularly if you're already struggling with injury.

In this personal account of why Nintendo Ring Fit's customizable adjustments make it the ideal fitness companion for those who have been struck down with injuries of all kinds, TechRadar's Gaming Editor Vic Hood reveals why it could be your exercise BFF in 2022.

New Year's fitness resolutions don't have to all be about HIIT workouts and ultra-marathons getting started with a daily walk is a fine start, and TechRadar's Senior Gaming Editor Adam Vjestica is aiming to reinvigorate his strolls with a healthy dash of gamification.

LikePokmon Go, Pikmin Bloom lets you grow a miniature army of followers, but also compels you to get outside by diarizing your walks in a charming, motivational fashion. You can even use it to record your mood each day, making it arguably the ultimate January survival tool.

While many of us are looking forward to spending our retirements in a Black Mirror-style VR utopia, TechRadar's Computing writer Jess Weatherbed has vowed get a head-start in 2022 by sinking some serious time into the Oculus Quest 2.

Sadly, it's probably not wise to spend 12 hours a day playing Beat Saber, which is why this excellent summary of the full range of VR experiences out there from social apps like VRChat to artistic workouts like Tilt Brush is the primer you need to help you maintain a healthy VR life this year.

It's the job that photographers and videographers put off the most: creating a secure backup system for all their photos and videos.

But whether you're a pro with a bulgingAdobe Lightroomlibrary or a hobbyist who relies onGoogle Photos, creating a photo backup is a New Year's resolution that's well worth making in 2022 and James Abbott's in-depth guide is here to show you how to do it.

Over the course of 2021, Josie Watson started getting fed up with her dependence on a phone. From doomscrolling through social media to apps incessantly blasting notifications designed to trap you into an endless cycle of personalized ads wedged between posts from school friends and family members showing off engagement photos, sharing pixelated unfunny memes, or bragging about their culinary skills.

Flash forward to Josie starting at TechRadar andusing a smartwatch to learn more about her anxiety. She soon realized these wearables were so much more than just a fancy timepiece.

We'll be publishing new features daily between Sunday December 26th and Sunday January 2nd so here, in order, are the ones to look forward to over the coming week.

See original here:

Tech Resolutions 2022: how to upgrade your year with life-boosting tech - TechRadar

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Its no secret cannabis retailers have upped their game. Its not just what they sell but how usually a combination of design, staff excellence, and overall vibe that make the best weed stores standout among the pack. Customers are taking notice and looking for more than just a place to buy their legal cannabis products: They want an experience.

With more states coming online legalizing recreational cannabis, we expect there will be more and more exciting retail options opening around the country. Until then, here's a look back atfive top stores Green Entrepreneur highlighted in 2021, from a luxury dispensary in Toronto to an all female- and black-owned outfit in Los Angeles.

RELATED:Are You Ready to BuyWeedAt theMall?

With the launch of their second store in Toronto, Edition is establishing itself as the go-to name for luxury cannabis in Canada. If your post-pandemic travel plans arent taking you north of the border, their e-commerce site features all their curated cannabis offerings and elegant accessories. But its at their retail locations the newest being Edition St Clair that customers can best appreciate Editions elegant design, impeccable service and specially mixed playlists.

The Ottawa dispensary is a technicolor, Willie Wonka-like stroll into a cannabis utopia. Part boardwalk carnival, part retro diner, and part cannabis store, Supretteis a joint venture between co-founders Mimi Lam and Drummond Munro. "This new store really shows the evolution of Superette as a brand and how we can continue to push the boundaries on our retail experience. From vintage diner to house of mirrors this customer journey will be unlike any other," says co-founder Drummond Munro.

Known for selling premium flower to stores across California, Wonderbrett opened its own storefront in Hollywood this year.The company was among the thousands to apply to receive a coveted SocialEquity Retail License from the L.A. Department of Cannabis Regulation.WIth hand-hewn oak beams and textured pattern herringbone wood floors., A-frame skylights,hand-pounded Indian metal light fixtures with Edison bulbs, and even an"Instagram Wall" meant for shareable photos, it's a concept befitting L.A.

RELATED:5 WaysCannabis RetailersCan Differentiate Themselves

For a band that lost its almost-mythical leader in 1995, the Grateful Dead will simply not fade away. And when devoted Deadhead David Ellison, founder of craft cannabis start-upScarlet Fire, wanted to put his passion for the band on display at his new retail store in Toronto, he called onSevenPoint Interiorsto make it happen. Having designed several eye-catching cannabis spaces since 2017, ran with Ellisons vision, developing a brand identity for Scarlet Fire and even creating a gallery for Ellisons personal collection of Dead memorabilia gathered over thirty years of fandom.The results arepositively trippy.

When you cant find what you want, build it yourself.Thats what Whitney Beatty and Ebony Andersen have done withJosephine & Billies, their new speakeasy-style dispensary in Los Angeles. The concept was created specifically for Women of Color and allies by Women of Color, the first of its kind in the country.

Inspired by tea pads that existed in Black communities in the 1920s and 1930s, the South L.A. spot is as much about community and education as it is selling cannabis products. Its alsothe first official investment from Jay-Zs The Parent Company, which launched a social equity corporate venture fund to help discover and develop the industrys future entrepreneurs of color.

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5 Top Weed Stores We Toured This Year - Green Entrepreneur

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Hows everyone doing? Because I am not great.

Just this morning alone, while reading through my inbox, I wrestled withdisappearing orcas,melting polar ice caps, climate-related natural disasters, and the fact that we cant get a federal bill passed that has even a little bit of foresight.

There is so much bad news.

I am languishing. Burned-out. Feeling both overwhelmed and ineffective at fighting the dread. And then pissed at myself for feeling exhausted. Who am I to take a break when things are this grim? I have friends who are COVID-ward doctors.

But pushing yourself through burnout leads to more burnout, and we cant be effective citizens, advocates, humans, or friends when were grounddown. We need respite.

Luckily, we can look to a whole range of cultures for ways to achieve that and find light in the dark season. There have always been bad things happening, and across the subarctic, some of the darkest countries in the world have December practices that date back far before Jesuss birth. They remind us to get off the train of sad news for a second, take a breath, reflect, and catch up on the year. Maybe evenread something good.

In other years I might have glossed over the idea of reflecting and slowing down. But currently Im feeling the need to pause before rushing into a new year, longer days, and new resolutions. I want to focus on individual stories other than the wave of news breaking in my face. Taking that space feels like a form of resilience.

If you, like me, are not great at getting to that place of reflection on your own, here are some books and films from the past year or so that can help. Ive arranged them by what they offered me: a sense of wonder, connection, and hope.

This years most talked-about piece of media (at least in the very exclusive pod of tastemakers that is my running group) was My Octopus Teacher. The film won the best-documentary Oscar for its portrayal of a South African divers fascination with one of these creatures. What could have been a treacly, top-down flick about a man forging a connection with an animal is instead a joyful take on how nature changes us if we take the time to pay attention.

If you want to stay in the realm of animal consciousness but are after something completely reliant on visuals, consider Gunda, directed by documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky. Its a meditative, mesmerizing piece about the inner workings of barnyard life, shot completely in black and white, without any narration or talking. Come for the cute baby pigs, stay for the crisp, patient cinematography, which is so vivid that it almost gave me ASMR-level brain tingles.

Essayist Margaret Renkl, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, is a genius at pulling expansive metaphors out of the natural world. For instance, shell gracefully equate butterflies with democracy to get into why we should protect both. She wields such metaphors beautifully in her newest release, Graceland, at Last, which looks at the complexities of her home state. (If you want a similar book, I read that Renkl loves Ross Gays Book of Delights, a collection of daily essays that Gay wrote to focus on finding delight in his own life. Topics range from wildflowers to nicknames, and theyll inspire you to pay attention to your own small pleasures.)

Over the past few years there have been several booksdelving into the neural networks of trees and how these organisms communicate with each other. (This years highlight wasFinding the Mother Tree, by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who pioneered this field of research.) It felt like the subject matter was ripe for a high-definition movie, and this yearsThe Hidden Life of Treesa documentary based on the 2015 book of the same name by Peter Wohllebencaptures the interconnectedness of forests and the myriad ways humans impact that web in hyperrealistic detail. Its exactly the kind of thing to watch if you want to be reminded of the fact that the earth is bigger and smarter than us.

Last winter, pre-vaccine, post-insurgence, when things felt particularly grim, I picked up Wintering, Katherine Mays book about seasonality and how were biologically geared to need time to rest, especially in the outdoors. It felt like the answer to a question I didnt even know I was asking, about why I felt stressed out and disconnected from the natural world. Ive now reread it twice and gleaned new details each time, on everything from swimming to Stonehenge.

Creating a livable future isnt going to be easy, and in Believers, Lisa Wells confronts that head-on. She profiles renegade groups working on creative ways to face climate change, and she digs into the very human struggles that come from trying to build a utopia, or at least a new way of living. The results are gritty, vivid, and real.

I love Elizabeth Kolbert, but Id held off reading her newest book, Under a White Sky, because it felt like more bad news than I could bear. However, a friend recently convinced me that Kolberts pragmatic, forward-looking realism could help buoy me against my worst anxieties. Her account of the ways we might try to use engineering and innovation to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis showed me that although humans cant keep operating indefinitely as we are, we do have options on how to proceed.

Kolbert is one of my heroes, for the way she tells clear, multifaceted stories about the overwhelming, intractable nature of climate change. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is anothershe always seems to be at the forefront of realistic discussions about climate policy and action. Her bookSaving Usis less about climate science than it is about how to talk to people who think and feel differently than you do, which seems like a crucial thing to learn right now.

One of the only things that keeps me from descending into a pit of existential despair is that children and teenagers these days are so much more savvy and clear-eyed about the future than I ever could have imagined being at their age. Thats on full display in Youth V. Gov, a 2020 documentary about a wide-ranging group of kids across the U.S. who are suing the government for its failure to address climate change.

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Our Environmental Columnist's Anti-Burnout End-of-Year Reading and Watching List - Outside